Douglas Niles: Measure and the Truth

As a result, some nearly four weeks after the mine was started, the shaft was completed to Dram’s, and the emperor’s, satisfaction.

It was time, Jaymes declared, to bring in the black powder and to set a very long fuse.

Ankhar paced the small circle of the High Lookout. That was as high up as he dared to go in the great fortress. The Nest of the Kingfisher, perched on its spire some fifty feet over his head, he judged to be too small to accommodate his size and weight. Anyway, from where he was he could see everything he needed to see. With Pond-Lily at his side, he watched the fortress and the enemy army and left the planning of the defenses to the others.

Despite his bluster about hiding behind walls, he had quickly concluded that was a very good place to live. There was plenty of food, and the officers of the Solamnic Knights had maintained a splendid wine cellar that had been requisitioned by the dark forces. When he and Pond-Lily went inside, they spent their time in a couple of very nice rooms high up in the tower. He had hobgoblins bring up his food and drink, so he never had to bother himself going up and down the long flights of stairs.

Occasionally he grew a little wistful, remembering Laka or the heady days of his great invasions out in the open air. He truly missed his stepmother, but when he cradled the Shaft of Hiddukel in his arms, he felt the presence of the Prince of Lies and that brought Laka very much into his thoughts and feelings. She had been, and would remain, the central Truth of his life.

Wandering through the wilds, living outside in the wind and rain, trying to maintain order in a large, chaotic band of barbarians-those old Truths entailed a great deal of work, a significant amount of discomfort, and massive aggravation. He had realized during the weeks in the tower that he was really very tired being a great leader. Being there with Pond-Lily in the comfort of his fine rooms, was a much more comfortable existence.

On that gloomy late-summer afternoon, clouds glowered low across the Vingaard Range, and the threat of an impending storm crackled in the air. But the half-giant’s rooms in the tower were rainproof, and Ankhar suspected that, come winter, they would prove quite snug as well. So he wasn’t worried about the weather, or much of anything else, as he propped his foot on the parapet. The rampart was waist high to a human, but it came up only to Ankhar’s knees and made for a comfortable brace as he looked out over the fortress.

There was the great gatehouse in front of him, manned with a hundred ogres and an equal number of Dark Knights, commanding the approaches from the south. The ogres had stacked great piles of boulders on the upper platforms and were prepared to rain those down on any attackers who came within fifty or sixty paces. Every once in a while, an ogre tossed one of those rocks in the direction of the dwarf miners laboring some three or four hundred paces away. The dwarves were well out of range of the impulsive attacks, but throwing the stones gave the ogres a bit of useful target practice as well as the grist for wagers and other amusements.

Protecting that garrison were two massive outer gates, a pair of portcullises that could be dropped at a moment’s warning, and an interior set of gates that were just as massive as those in the outer wall. If an attacker somehow managed to penetrate inside, he would find himself in a deep courtyard, with commanding positions on all four sides where the defenders could pour a murderous fire of arrows, rocks, and burning oil down upon him.

The half-giant had learned that at the time Hoarst and the Black Army attacked the place, the emperor and his Solamnics had garrisoned the tower with only three hundred knights, far too few to defend the place. The Knights of Solamnia had paid the price when the Dark Knights flew up and landed atop the walls then opened the gates for their comrades outside. With that history in mind, Ankhar was glad for the more than two thousand ogres and Dark Knights who now patrolled the walls.

The half-giant spotted the Nightmaster, clad all in black, walking among the troops down there on the gatehouse ramparts. The priest had diligently overseen the preparation of the defenses, and Ankhar was pleased to have him down there. He was further pleased by a corollary benefit: having the cleric down there meant that the man was not up here with the half-giant. The sight of that veiled, featureless face never failed to send a shiver up and down his spine.

The Dark Knights, too, seemed inclined to avoid the half-giant in his lofty aerie, and Ankhar was not displeased by their wariness. After all, he had his woman and a cadre of loyal ogres and hobgoblins waiting on him. All was right in his world.

“How long we stay here, Ankhy?” asked Pond-Lily, sidling close.

He shrugged. “You like it here?”

“Yes, I do.” She snuggled against him, sighing blissfully.

“Me too. Maybe we stay for a long time. Live here in winter, with fires on hearths to keep us warm.” With a squeeze of his massive arm, he held her tight.

“I like that. But bad men-what if they come and fight us? What those dwarves doing anyway?”

Ankhar chuckled genially. “Dwarves, hah! We squash them if they come too close. And see little fort down there, pet? Bad men have to fight through that first!”

And right then, before his very eyes, that massive gatehouse simply disintegrated. He saw the explosion before he heard it: the platform where a hundred ogres and a hundred Dark Knights stood blasted straight up into the air, propelled by a gout of flame and smoke that seemed to erupt like a volcano from somewhere deep in the bowels of Krynn. Pieces of stone shot high into the sky, intermingled with lazily tumbling bloody figures of ogres and men.

Next he felt the pressure of the blast, a sickening lurch in the floor beneath his feet. The massive High Clerist’s Tower swayed like a tree in the wind, and for an instant, the half-giant was certain he would be pitched over the low side and fall to certain death. Pond-Lily screamed, and for a moment, that piercing noise, coming from right below his ear, was the only sound he heard.

Finally the sound of the explosion reached him, a boom of noise louder than any blast of thunder he had ever heard. It felt like a punch to the heart and gut and deep inside his brain, knocking all the air out of him, smashing and staggering him. He tumbled back against the interior column, where the tower climbed to its lofty Kingfisher’s nest, then slumped to a sitting position, stunned and staring. The first echo came then, almost as loud as the initial blast, and all he could do was numbly clap his hands over his ears.

Jaymes, Coryn, Dram, and the generals watched the explosion from a mile away. The dwarf let out a whoop as the column of debris-intermixed with smoke and searing balls of fire-spewed high into the air. The blast was tremendous, carrying away the entirety of the south gatehouse and a great section of the adjacent wall. Even the huge spire of the central tower felt the shock, swaying visibly back and forth. Churning upward, the mass of smoke and destruction billowed into the sky. Bursts of fire showed in the darkness of the cloud, and for a splendid few heartbeats, the great scatter of debris poised, almost weightless, in the air.

The smoke kept climbing, but almost immediately stones, rocks, and bodies rained back down across the pass, killing men and ogres of the garrison who had survived the blast but weren’t quick enough to duck under shelter. One slab of wall, a hundred feet wide, smashed every Dark Knight on a nearby rampart above the curtain wall. A huge portcullis, bars twisted but still banded together, crushed three ogres who stupidly had raced outside the base of the main tower to gape in astonishment at the devastation.